“Daddy, Daddy,” said Charissa in a sing-song voice, “we’re going to race you down the steps.”
“No, when we’ve had a look at the abbey we will walk down, and we will do so like wise people and not like baboons,” I told her.
“Let the girls be, Bella,” said Jean-Louis sternly and loudly. “They are just little kids.”
Charissa and Carmen jumped around with glee at their father’s support.
-0-
It was hot and airless in the abbey.
We sat down on a long, low, wooden bench, the sunlight from the clerestory windows behind the altar ahead of us, illuminating our faces.
On the stone altar table stood a large crucifix, also of stone. The eyes of Jesus, hanging in His very holy Glory on the Cross, were closed and a cloth covered the intimate parts of this most holy of Christian Holies. A nail with a mushroom shaped top protruded from the most holy of feet; the slim, bony right foot over the left, the nail embedded in the bridge of the foot. The bridge of the foot is a pyramid-like collection of three bones, the cuneiform, the cuboid and the navicular bone. Also from my anatomy text book of my first year at ‘uni’. In front of the altar table stood a large basket of drooping flowers: a week or two must have gone by since they were placed in the basket.
An old couple sat down in the pew in front of us. Each clutched a Bible and a Rosary from which hung a small metal crucifix; the crucifixes had started to rust so their owners must have had them for a long time. Drops of perspiration dripped steadily from the man’s ears, and had turned the beige of his shirt the brown of a potato.
Carmen found the man’s wet ears funny.
“Stop,” said Jean-Louis.
He shot an annoyed glance at her.
So he can reprimand his daughters.
“Why are you not a nun?” she asked me.
“Why should I be, Carmen?”
Two nuns with what I thought were sad eyes in their pale faces just, at that moment, walked in, halted in front of the altar, and made the sign of the cross in front of the crucified Christ.
“Yes, why are you not a nun?” Charissa supported her sister.
“Why should I be, Charissa?” I repeated my question.
“You’re not married and nuns aren’t married either,” she offered as explanation. “Our dad can’t marry you because he is married to our mom.”
“I …,” I began.
“Leave it Bella,” Jean-Louis silenced me with a stern whisper. “Come on girls, let’s go have a bite to eat,” he told the two.
We descended the stairs in an orderly manner.
On Grande Rue the girls wanted to look into the souvenir shops.
“You’re not going to buy rubbish,” warned Jean-Louis.
They wanted to buy their mother something and from the made-in-China souvenirs on the shelves they chose a snow globe, the mount inside it.
“Is that not pretty?” cooed Jean-Louis with obvious fake delight.
The salesgirl had turned the snowball over and the fake snow was swimming around the glass globe like small fish in an aquarium.
“Wait, give your mom this from me,” said Jean-Louis.
He put a set of a large embroidered tablecloth and twelve napkins on the counter.
“Can you wrap these nicely too?” he asked the saleslady.
Oh, those will be hell to wash and iron.
We returned to Sylvain’s restaurant and we had moules marinières and French fries and when Carmen asked for an ice cream for dessert, Jean-Louis refused to let her have it because of the diabetes and she began to cry noisily.
Quickly, we settled the bill and left.
-0-
We drove along the coast on a winding road only locals knew of and we came to a lay-by and pulled up. Charissa and Carmen had been jumping up and down on the rear seat chanting they wanted to ride their bikes on the beach below.
I sat down on the sand and Jean-Louis walked the two, they, pushing their bikes, down to the water’s edge where the sand was firmer and good for cycling. I watched the three of them: a perfect holiday snap of a father and his two daughters, fruit of his loins, as my mother referred to the little children who came with their parents for a holiday at La Presbytère. The breeze from the sea beyond which lay England and further away the American continent, rustled their hair.
The girls on their bikes and riding over the wet sand, I watched Jean-Louis walk back towards me. He had removed his sandals again and had also again rolled up his jeans to his knees. He kept on turning to look at his daughters; their excited laughter drifted towards me.
A father and his daughters.
They were not my daughters. Would never be. Therefore, what right did I have to sit there with this man and his two daughters? That was the question mulling in my head. Should his wife and the mother of those daughters not be sitting here?
Jean-Louis threw himself down on the sand beside me.
“Don’t let them needle you, Bella,” he said. “They are good kids.”
He drew up his legs and rested his elbows on his naked knees. He wiggled his toes into the sand.
“I know, Jean-Louis,” I said.
I lay back on the sand.
“Hey,” said Jean-Louis, “one of us must keep an eye on the girls, so do not fall asleep, because I think I will.”
-0-
It was mid-afternoon. The sun shone down on the water. Gulls, sitting on red buoys swaying on the water, began to squawk. I lifted myself up on an elbow. The gulls, half a dozen of them, were pecking at something on the surface of the water alongside the buoys. Soon, one lifted his head and had a small fish in his pointed yellow beak. He fluttered his grey wings and lifted his white body off the buoy and circled above it once, twice and a third time and, wings dipped, made a perfect landing back onto the buoy. Through a clumsy movement - perhaps - he dropped his catch onto the buoy and instantly the other gulls which appeared to have sat there sleeping, came to life, long, thin legs in waltzing movements stepping high. Amid high-pitched war cries, beaks pecked at the small fish and at each other too. Their cries became triumphant shrieks and with a wave of their wings they were airborne. After circling the buoys they flew towards the shore. The small dead fish remained lying on the buoy on which the gull had dropped it and soon a ripple in the sea swept it back into the water.
I lay down again and I closed my eyes. Jean-Louis’ eyes were closed too. Charissa and Carmen’s laughter was approaching.
“Bella?” asked Jean-Louis.
His eyes were still closed.
“Yes.”
“You should not so go on at the girls. Just let them be. Also, I know Carmen should not be eating ice cream and such sugary things, but her blood sugar remains fairly steady with the insulin injections, so she can have a little fun this weekend. Christ - she is so young to have something like this hanging over her.”
I said nothing. I sighed, but I remained silent.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jean-Louis continued. “I think we … you, in fact, should not speak to Carmen about the illness after all.”
“If you think so.”
“I know the purpose of coming here this weekend was for you to speak to her about it, but I think it will just make matters worse. If you know what I mean.”
Certainly, I knew what he meant.
“That’s fine with me,” I said.
“Maybe some other time.”
“Sure.”
“Daddy, Daddy!” came the voices of the two.
They wanted their father to see the scallop seashell they had found.
“Are there others there?” he asked.
“Lots!” they said simultaneously.
The bicycles having been thrown down, father and daughters walked off, their feet sinking into the sand with each step and leaving distorted footprints.
I stayed sitting in the sunshine on the sand.
I sat there, the three’s merry laughter in my ears, and I thought of the anxious face of a fa
ther in the moment before his child was born, as I had seen in my days at Chartreux Hospital. I thought of the love I had seen in the eyes of a father in the moment he held his newborn child in his arms for the first time; how he held the tiny finger still dirty with the blood of she who had carried the seed in her womb which he had sowed there.
What was I doing having an affair with a married man? A married man and a father?
God, how I hated myself at that moment.
-0-
We drove back to Le Presbytère. Charissa and Carmen, on their knees on the rear seat, were looking back to the mount.
“Well, what do you think of Saint Michael’s Mount?” I called out to them, my voice raised over the noisy drone of the car’s engine.
“It’s ok,” both said.
Jean-Louis took his eyes off the road and towards me and smiled.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
“We’ll have something nice to eat this evening, don’t worry. I’m sure Gertrude is going to do one of her specials for us tonight.”
“I’m not hungry!” Charissa called out, having slumped back onto the rear seat, her feet on it too.
“I want some more ice cream,” stated Carmen.
She too was sitting down and her feet were on the back of my seat.
My mom had put a ‘Reserved’ notification on a table under the copse of trees for us.
Valentin, who some nights played the piano at the Vaybee and was another cousin of Fred, Frascot and Gertrude, was sitting at the guest house’s piano which had been carried outside for the diners’ entertainment. He was flipping through some sheet music deciding what to play. Honorine, in a black mini-dress and white frilly apron, her feet in silver sandals, walked up to him and bent over his shiny bald head which always had my brother and I, when we were children, giggling, because we called him ‘the pomegranate’ behind his back. The bald head nodded and its owner flipped back a few pages, bent forward a little, and began to play Debussy’s Feuilles Mortes.
Fallen leaves can be picked up by the shovelful … So can memories and regrets … And the north wind takes them … into the cold night of oblivion… You see, I have not forgotten … The song you used to sing me…
Martine, dressed like Honorine, handed each of us a menu. Jean-Louis was also handed the wine menu.
This song is like us …You used to love me and I used to love you … And we used to live together …You loving me, me loving you …
“What are we going to have?” asked Jean-Louis.
But life separates lovers …Pretty slowly, noiselessly … And the sea erases on the sand … the separated lovers’ footprints …
“May I suggest something this time?” I asked.
“Sure, but don’t you always, Bella?”
The girls wanted French fries and ice cream: no degree of persuasion on the part of their father succeeded in changing their mind. Jean-Louis and I began with a tomato salad and our main course was filets de merlan au gratin, one of Gertrude’s specialities and much liked by our English guests, especially when it was served with boiled potatoes. That night we also had boiled potatoes with it.
Valentin played a medley of country songs. Next, and without pausing, he played some French songs. Probably having exhausted his repertoire of French songs, he returned to the country songs, repeating those he had played before.
Jean-Louis called Honorine over and asked her to serve the man a beer.
“To give our eardrums a rest,” he said to me.
Served a tankard of frothing beer and a plate of French fries, Valentin bopped his bald head in our direction. He went to sit on a folding stool some distance away, ignoring the knife and fork Honorine had handed him, preferring to eat the fries with his fingers and licking those each time he had popped a French fry onto his very red tongue.
Jean-Louis and I finished the bottle of Chablis Grand Cru Honorine had served us without us having asked for it, but just for, “Some white wine, please Honorine”. When I saw the bottle, condensation on it becoming droplets, I knew it was going to cost Jean-Louis a small fortune. I planned to have a word with my mother for doing that to him.
He wiped away some of the droplets with a finger and pressed the wet finger to the tip of my nose.
“Red,” I asked him, “my nose?”
“Goodness, no! Just flushed.”
-0-
We sat chatting, Charissa and Carmen running around, chasing pigeons which had flown up and were pecking at the leftovers on abandoned plates which Martine and Honorine had not yet cleared away. The two girls had not eaten all of their French fries, and the pigeons, beady eyes staring at Jean-Louis and I, flew to our table and began to peck away at what the two had left. Honorine came to say that the dinner and the wine were on the house. So, my mother was not being nasty at all, but, in fact, very generous. Jean-Louis handed her a twenty franc note as a tip and handed her another to give to Valentin, sitting at a table hungrily devouring another plate of food he had been given: a grilled steak and more French fries. Again, he nodded his bald head, rivulets of perspiration running down it, in Jean-Louis’ direction.
“Goodnight, Doc,” said he to me on passing him.
“Goodnight, Valentin, we loved your playing tonight. Made our dinner a very pleasant experience,” I told him.
“Thanks, Doc. You’re always welcome, Doc.”
“Nice music,” Jean-Louis said to him.
“Thanks, Mr Jean-Louis,” he replied.
-0-
Jean-Louis went with the girls to the ‘Tony of Colorado’ room to help Carmen with the insulin injection. I climbed the stairs to the ‘Rose Window’ room.
Quickly, I changed to a pair of unromantic pyjamas which were too warm for a hot and humid night as that one was.
I chose the bed furthest from the window. I switched off the ceiling light as well as the lamp on my bedside table. After quite a while I heard footsteps come up the stairs. I turned my back to the door.
“Bella …?”
I pretended to be fast asleep. I wonder what the time was, but could not look on my wristwatch: my mom had silenced the grandfather clock.
Jean-Louis undressed in the dark and he sighed when in his bed.
“Bella?” he called out keeping his voice down. “Are you asleep, darling?”
I did not reply.
Soon, he was snoring lightly.
I wondered whether I should wake him, but I did not want what I knew would follow. I did not know the Jean-Louis I had seen that day: Jean-Louis, the father. And I did not have sex with strangers.
-0-
In the morning, after breakfast, we piled back into the Combi. A halo of mist hung above the mount. From the chimneys of the houses of Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque grey smoke shot into the air. The girls wanted something to eat for when we were driving back to Paris, so Jean-Louis pulled up outside the bakery. Amandine was at her usual place behind the till accepting money from customers who had gone to buy the morning’s bake of croissants.
The girls wanted pains au chocolat and ran in to buy some, their father keeping the Combi’s engine running.
Amandine saw me through the window and waved. I waved back.
The road to Paris, so familiar to me and having become familiar to Jean-Louis too, seemed long. The girls ate their pains au chocolat and stuck their chocolate-covered tongues out at children in the cars we passed. Jean-Louis and I talked about the work which lay ahead in the coming week: Chartreux Hospital had three births scheduled for each day.
“Will it be alright for me to drop you off at your place?” he asked.
We had reached Paris and we crossed the Seine on Pont Notre Dame, tourists, laden with cameras, already massing in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. Just at that moment, as if the Almighty in Heaven was heralding a welcome to the tourists, the cathedral’s bells began to chime.
In front of my building, Jean-Louis descended from the car, took my overnight bag from the back and carried it for me to the building�
�s door.
“Will it be alright if I leave it here, Bella?”
“Of course, Jean-Louis.”
“I’ll phone you later. Must just get the girls back to Col … their mother.”
The two, having scrambled onto the front passenger seat, which I had freed, they pulled funny faces at me.
-0-
Jean-Louis came back. He did not telephone to say he was on his way: always he telephoned before coming over. My doorbell rang. Three short rings. It identified the caller as him.
“You’ve not turned in for the night yet?” he asked.
He wore a different sweater from the one of the weekend. This one was pink. He had a beige jacket slung over an arm. I had not yet changed into my pyjamas.
“You’ve not thrown my toothbrush out yet, Bella?” he asked next.
On his previous overnight stay he had told me to throw out his toothbrush because he was going to buy another.
“I forgot, Jean-Louis.”
He asked whether I would like a glass of wine. He kept wine and beer at my place.
“Are you having one?” I asked.
“Need it, yes! The girls’ mother … Col … kicked up a fuss because Carmen’s blood sugar was high. She’s blaming me for it.”
I told him to sit down and I will bring him a glass of wine.
“I do not want to drink alone, Bella.”
He never wanted to be the only one in a room to be drinking.
“I’ll join you. I was thinking of having a glass before you rang my doorbell.”
His hair was tousled and his face was biscuit brown from the weekend’s sun.
“Did you enjoy the weekend, Jean-Louis?” I asked.
“I did, but I am afraid the girls spoiled it for you. When one is not used to children then …”
Quite.
He followed me to the kitchen and I told him to choose a bottle of wine from my wine rack. His choice was a Saint-Émilion, one of his bottles, and with a jerk of his head showed me to take the glasses to the living room: he followed with the opened bottle.
Bella...A French Life Page 23
